A convicted killer who had been at the Nebraska State Penitentiary 31 years died Saturday of what state officials believed to be natural causes.

Dennis Sell, 64, was serving consecutive sentences for two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of sexual assault in the deaths of Lexington women Judy Dangler and Ruth Eby. At the time of the 1977 crimes, he had been paroled on a sexual assault conviction and was free on bond awaiting sentencing for a second separate sexual assault conviction.

In July 2008, the Journal Star wrote stories about the effect of the murders on the families of the two women. Dangler's two daughters and Eby's three children recounted the profound impact of the loss of their mothers at the hands of Sell.

Several of them said they had dreaded and feared a time when Sell might be paroled. He had been eligible for parole since 1999.

Jacki Rains, Dangler's oldest daughter, said Monday she was relieved she no longer has to worry about that.

She and others had received notification from Victim Information and Notification Everyday (VINE), a computer-based service that notifies registered people of a change in an inmate's status, that Sell was no longer in custody.

"It set off a wave of panic," she said.

She and other family members frantically made phone calls until they found out by looking at the Department of Corrections inmate locator that he had died.

State Penitentiary spokesman Win Barber said Monday Sell died Saturday morning at the prison. He had been ill for a while, Barber said.

A cause of death has not been determined, he said. A grand jury will conduct an investigation, as is the case when any inmate dies in custody.

Rains said she and her sister would have liked to know why Sell had killed their mother and Eby.

"Now we will never know why," she said. "He took that to the grave with him.

"But it's over, done. We can have the good memories instead of the bad memories."

Eileen Miller Wilson also got notification this weekend about Sell's death. She was college age in 1977 when the two women disappeared and the town of Lexington was thrown into a panic.

After the murders, Sell had gone to Wilson's parents' dental laboratory, at their home, to apply for a job. He was in the lab with her mother for 20 to 30 minutes waiting for her father to return from the post office. Sell finally left.

"For a couple of months it totally freaked us all out," Wilson said. "It was just terrifying to me as a young adult."

She had nightmares for a long time.

Her brother-in-law had worked next to Sell at the Sperry-New Holland plant in Lexington, where Sell was employed as a welder. It is where the killer got the side cutter pliers he used to kill Eby.

"Besides being my personal 'bogyman,'" Wilson said, "our family had a connection to this monster."

It was her parents who later identified Dangler's denture.

Wilson, too, is glad she no longer has to keep track of Sell. She wants his victims' families to know they've had a silent partner in her family.

"We've been praying for them all these years," she said.

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.